Mercury,
March/April 2003 Table of Contents
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This
2MASS near-infrared image reveals a central bar in galaxy
NGC 253 that does not appear in optical images. Courtesy of
UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF. |
by
Schuyler Van Dyk
The
2MASS survey brings the infrared sky to your fingertips.
Jack
Dembicky, the Northern Hemisphere observer for tonight, enters the
dome at dusk and readies for another night of routine observations
by the Two Micron All Sky Survey, or 2MASS, for short. He fills
the camera dewar on the telescope and loads the schedule file for
tonight's observations into the computer program, which automatically
controls the operations of both the telescope and the camera. It
looks like it's going to be a good night on Mount Hopkins, about
55 kilometers south of Tucson, Arizona. With a push of a button
on the keyboard, the telescope flies into motion. Jack leans back
in his chair, monitoring the observations as they come off the telescope
and settles himself in for the long night.
This
night, one of hundreds, would turn out to be normal for 2MASS operations,
which began in April 1997 and finished in February 2001. 2MASS is
an ambitious joint project carried out by the University of Massachusetts
in Amherst (UMass) and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
(IPAC) at the California Institute of Technology, and is funded
by NASA and the National Science Foundation. The project has involved
about 35 scientists and 30 software engineers and operators from
UMass, IPAC, and other institutions, led by principal investigator
Michael F. Skrutskie (now at the University of Virginia), lead scientist
Roc M. Cutri (IPAC), and project manager Rae F. Stiening (UMass).
2MASS's
goal was to conduct a highly uniform digital imaging survey of the
entire sky in three near-infrared bands: J (1.25 microns, or 0.00125
millimeters), H (1.65 microns), and K-"short" (2.17 microns). The
results include an image Atlas, as well as highly reliable and complete
catalogs of point sources (mostly stars) and extended sources (mostly
galaxies). "2MASS" is a play on words "2 microns" (near the wavelength
of the reddest band) and "UMass."
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